


Grief Is Not Sustainable

by PartiallyStars_MostlyVoid



Category: The Property of Hate
Genre: Prose for the sake of itself, brief mentions of child death, exercises in word arranging
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-23
Updated: 2015-02-23
Packaged: 2018-03-14 18:08:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3420509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PartiallyStars_MostlyVoid/pseuds/PartiallyStars_MostlyVoid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not easy, finding a Hero. There's such a long list of requirements that have to be met.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grief Is Not Sustainable

They had to be young, that was the first thing. The Heroes of this kind of story were never much older than ten at the most. It wasn’t very clear why, but the narrative just seemed to require a child at it’s center. Maybe it was something to do with innocence, or belief, or not having been tainted by growing up, or a thousand other whimsical explanations of the same ilk. Whichever it was, the fact remained that the Hero needed to be of the age where they knew what was real and what wasn’t, but didn’t believe that the former carried more weight than the latter. Not when it directly pertained to them, anyway. He would to any god you care to name that there was some other story to tell, that the machine of events that he tried so desperately to keep from running itself to pieces did not require gears so small and wires so fine. But it did. So he carried on.

They needed to be brave. Of course, when one is travelling in the company of monsters, such a trait is an absolute necessity. But it was more than that, it was a particular type of bravery. Not the bothersome, proactive kind, the sort that lead them jumping into danger in the misguided belief that they could not be hurt if they believed hard enough. More the sort that lay still and silent in the depths until it was actually required, whereupon it would bloom like some impossible flower and cause it’s carrier to act in ways quite contradictory to their ordinary nature. Running until you could run no more, and then, instead of simply breaking down and allowing yourself to be swallowed up by your pursuer, turning to fight like a thing possessed- that was a kind of bravery, wasn’t it? The only kind he needed, anyhow. The other sorts just got him- got _them-_ into trouble.

And then, regrettably, they were required to have some degree of stubbornness about their character. The strength of will to carry on, to focus on a goal, however nebulous it might be, and pursue it to the best on their ability. They lasted longest, the ones who had that about them. The sheer force of a refusal to accept whatever events were acting against them and to carry on regardless. They bent the softened reality of the Other Place around them a little when they were like that, although none of them had ever known and he had been careful not to tell them. They didn’t need anything else to worry about, after all.

And so the list went on. They needed a steady hand, a firm heart, a keen eye. And, of course, a head stuffed full of dreams. That in particular was important.

They had to be intelligent- clever enough to act independently should events warrant, but not enough to become wise, oh no, not wise. A Hero was never wise- wisdom was the prerogative of the guardian, the guide. It came through experience, and he had experience in abundance. He’s begun the journey more times than he could count by now (and this is a lie, he knows exactly how many times he’s started this abortive cycle off, how many failures, how many lives, he knows and wishes that he didn’t). An event multiplied by itself several times over with the common factor of the same, singular person equaled experience. You couldn’t argue with that. It stood to reason. And in the right light, it almost made sense.

He spent a lot of time finding the right light. Lighting was important, shadow too. He had found that the best set-up came about just before dawn, when the world was asleep and the barrier between the waking and the unconscious was stretched thin. It was in-between time, it was dream time. He would ask, and they, one foot in this world and one already in the other, would agree and off they would go, up and up and up, and he would tell himself not to be over-confident, that there was no way of knowing he’d picked the right one, not until they’d been put to the test, and even then it wasn’t really possible to say until after they had succeeded. But he knew. He always knew, with a conviction that grew stronger and stronger with every step that was not incorrectly placed, with every disaster skirted or fled from or avoided altogether, every lack of failure taken to be proof of success- he _knew_ he had the right one. Sometimes, the journey would be long enough for him to admit it to himself. Of course he was right, he knew what he was doing, after all. He had experience. He had chosen well and they would survive and they would succeed.

That is, until they didn’t.

Until they caught on, the clever ones, or were run through or drowned or crushed, the brave ones, or simply stopped and refused to move onwards, the stubborn ones.

Until they died. The dreaming ones.

And the wheels of the machine would creak back around, some important but ultimately misaligned part bent and broken under the weight of inertia, and everything would settle back into how it used to be with a resigned crash. A little more broken, a little more lost. And the course of events would continue to steer their fates, all of them, into final, inevitable destruction.

Time to start again.

He would get it right this time.

This much he knew.


End file.
